In what may be a surprise for some people, Bing has slipped down the search engine rankings, and according to comScore's qSearch data now occupies the number five spot globally. Replacing it as the fourth most used search engine is Russia's Yandex, a search engine most English-speaking people probably haven't heard of, but its huge popularity in Russia has recently allowed it to creep upwards and above Bing.

Bing recorded around 4.48 billion search queries for December 2012, while Yandex managed 4.84 billion queries; the sites had 2.5% and 2.8% of global market share respectively for the period. While these figures are close, they don't really compare to Google's worldwide market share of 65.2% with 114.7 billion queries, which indicates a huge monopoly on the market. Second-placed Baidu had 14.5 billion queries for 8.2% share, while Yahoo! came in third with 8.6 billion queries and 4.9% share.

Yandex occupies over 60% of the Russian market, and with an increased number of internet connected individuals in the country the search engine's share has risen considerably over the past year. Meanwhile, Bing's market share has stayed fairly stagnant thanks in part to slowing growth in Western markets, and so Microsoft couldn't keep up with Yandex to hold 4th place.

What Microsoft should be happy about, though, is that they've maintained 2nd spot in the United States (above Yahoo!) where the company has put significant effort into marketing. Microsoft now need to push into emerging markets, and with Bing integrated into products such as Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, they may be able to re-take fourth spot in the future.